German

The department offers six areas of concentration:

1. German Literature. This program focuses on the major periods and forms of German literature with emphasis on literary and historical analysis. Students will satisfy the general University requirement of eight departmental courses by taking a minimum of five courses in the department (at least three of which should be 300-level courses) and a maximum of three cognate courses in related humanities departments and other disciplines such as philosophy and religion.
2. German Philosophy and Intellectual History. This program concentrates on philosophy, political and cultural theory, particular intellectual movements, and epochs in German-speaking contexts. Students in this track are required to take a minimum of five courses in the German department (at least three of which should be 300-level courses) and a maximum of three relevant cognate courses in history, European cultural studies, or philosophy.
3. Media and Aesthetics. This program is designed for students who wish to focus on art, film, music, sound technology, and/or media theory broadly conceived. Students take a minimum of five courses in the German department (at least three of which should be 300-level courses), and a maximum of three relevant cognate courses in art and archaeology, music, philosophy, European cultural studies, and the Program in Visual Arts.
4. Germanic Linguistics. This program concentrates on the history and structure of the German language. Majors who select this program are required to take the following courses: LIN 213 Introduction to Language and Linguistics or a comparable course in linguistics, GER 505 History of the German Language, and either GER 506 Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy or GER 316, with the same title. In addition, such students will take at least three courses in German literature and culture and two cognate courses pertaining to linguistics.
5. The Study of Two Literatures. This plan of study normally consists of five upper-level courses in the German department (at least three of which should be 300-level courses), and three upper-level courses in a second literature. Students who have not completed the language preparation for the second literature may engage in the program provided that they satisfy that language requirement during the junior year.
6. Joint Program in German Culture and Politics. In cooperation with the Department of Politics, students may combine a concentration in German intellectual history with a concentration in German/European politics and/or political theory. In this program, four courses will be taken in the German department (at least two of which should be 300-level courses) and four cognate courses in German/European politics or political theory will be taken in the Department of Politics (at least two of which should be 300-level courses). Recommended departmental courses are GER 207, 208, 211, 306, 307, 309, and 324. Recommended cognates in politics include POL 210, 230, 231, 240, 306, 372, 373, and 385. The senior thesis may focus on any political topic with a substantive German-related component. Upon graduation, a letter will be issued by the German department certifying completion of a program in German cultural studies with a concentration in politics.

For areas 1 to 5, at least three, and for area 6, at least two of the departmentals should be courses taught in German. For areas 1 to 5, one of these three may be a course taught in English for which there is an appropriate German-language component. This option is available for all courses taught in the German department, but also for some courses in other departments. Students should consult with the course instructor regarding the German-language component at the beginning of the semester and submit the agreed-upon plan to the German departmental representative for approval by the end of the second week of classes.

Independent Work

Independent reading, the junior year essays, and the senior thesis constitute the student's total independent work, which is spread over the four upper-class terms. These elements can be profitably linked with departmental courses. Students will consult with the departmental representative under whose guidance they will develop their own program. During the first term of the junior year, students are required to write an essay of approximately 4,000 words on a subject in German philosophy, art, media, linguistics, literature, or politics. During the second term of the junior year, students will present a longer essay (of approximately 8,000 words). These essays, as well as the senior thesis, may be written in German or English. Early in May of the junior year students should discuss plans for their senior theses with the departmental representative.

During senior year students will write a thesis on a subject approved by their thesis adviser. By the end of the fourth week of the first senior term students will submit to their advisers a tentative outline of the proposed thesis. Further progress reports (as announced by the department) are required. Five weeks before the departmental examination students must deliver to the departmental office two spiral-bound readers' copies (signed). After the departmental exam and upon approval of the thesis, students must submit one bound copy for the department archive and one unbound copy for the library. Readers' copies will be returned to the student with comments in advance of the departmental exam. The title page must show the student's name and class numerals, the department in which the student is enrolled, the name of the adviser, and the month and year of presentation.

Senior Departmental Examination

The departmental examination will be oral, based on the thesis and the student's course of study. At least one fourth of the approximately hour-long exam will be conducted in German. Students should come prepared to give a 5-10 minute presentation about the argument and contribution of their thesis.

Study and Work Abroad

It is strongly recommended that students spend some time in a German-speaking country. This can be done through the Berlin Consortium for German Studies, the Princeton-in-Munich Study Abroad Program, or the department's Summer Work Program.

Berlin Study Abroad Program. Through the Berlin Consortium for German Studies, of which Princeton University is a member, Princeton undergraduates are eligible to spend either one semester or an entire academic year studying abroad at the Freie Universität Berlin for full Princeton academic credit. Students will pay normal Princeton tuition, and those on financial aid will continue to receive aid during their study abroad. Departmental students wishing to enroll in this or any other foreign study program may do so, provided they present an acceptable plan of study that includes fulfillment of the departmental requirements for independent work and their application is approved by the Faculty Committee on Examinations and Standing. Early consultation with the departmental representative is strongly encouraged. Applications for the Berlin program are due in early October for the spring term and in early March for the following academic year. For application forms and additional information, contact the departmental representative or the Office of International Programs at (609) 258-5524.

Princeton-in-Munich Study Abroad Programs. We offer two programs for study in Munich, Germany. (1) Students enrolled in GER 102, 1025, or 105 may apply  to participate in GER 105 or 107 in Munich. 2) Students enrolled in GER 107 or a 200 or 300 level seminar taught in German, or who have placed out of the language sequence, have the opportunity to apply to GER 3XXG in Munich. GER 105 and 107 are taught in a special month-long summer course at the Goethe-Institute and are partially subsidized by the University and the German department. GER 3XXG is taught by a Princeton professor. Successful completion of 107G in Munich satisfies the University's language requirement and qualifies students for upper-level courses in German, the Summer Work Program, and the Berlin Consortium. Successful completion of 3XXG reduces the required German language courses by one for major or certificate students. Interested students should consult with the departmental representative, Professor Thomas Y. Levin.

The Summer Work Program. The department places students in paid internships in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in fields such as banking, newspaper and book publishing, radio, healthcare, and computing. Salaries usually cover living expenses, and scholarship funds are available to help with transportation to and from the job where needed.

Courses

• GER 101 Beginner's German I FallThis course lays the foundation for functional acquisition of German, with attention to interpretation (listening/reading), production (speaking/writing) and cultural understanding. Class time is devoted to interactive language tasks that foster comprehension, vocabulary acquisition and fluency. Five hours per week. No credit given for GER 101 unless followed by GER 102. J. Rankin
• GER 102 Beginner's German II SpringContinuation of 101, with added emphasis on reading, communicative writing strategies, listening comprehension, vocabulary acquisition, and cultural analysis through film. Five hours per week. Staff
• GER 1025 Intensive Intermediate German SpringIntensive training in German, building on 101 and covering the acquisitional goals of 102 and 105: communicative proficiency, mastery of discourse skills and reading strategies to interpret and discuss contemporary German short stories, film and drama. Successful completion of the course (B- or above) leads to automatic eligibility for GER 107G in the Princeton-in-Munich program. Limited to students with a grade of A/A- in 101. Nine hours per week. J. Rankin
• GER 103 Beginner's German in Review Not offered this yearThe course provides students who have some background in German a brief review of material covered in 101, and then works on speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills at the level of 102. Five hours. Prerequisite: scores from placement/proficiency test administered during fall orientation and consultation with instructor. Staff
• GER 105 Intermediate German FallThe course aims to solidify previously acquired German, while expanding the range of usable vocabulary and syntax. Emphasis in class on task-based approaches to grammar, writing, listening comprehension and cultural understanding, using texts and film. Prerequisite: SAT Subject Test score of 570 and demonstrated oral competence, or successful completion of 102. To be followed by 107 to satisfy the A.B. language requirement. Four hours per week. Staff
• GER 107 Advanced German Fall/SpringFurther acquisition of proficiency in speaking, listening, reading, and writing using online media, film, and texts as a basis for interaction and analysis. The fall course provides extensive review of basic structures and vocabulary for incoming students with high school German instruction; the spring course dovetails with 105 in terms of cultural and grammatical topics. Prerequisite: SAT Subject Test score of 650 and demonstrated oral competence, or successful completion of 105. Satisfies the A.B. language requirement. Three hours per week. Staff
• GER 207 Studies in German Language and Style: Society, Politics, and Culture in Germany, 1890-1945 FallDiscussions of exemplary texts from modern German society and culture, including essays, speeches, autobiographies, works of literature, art, and film. The course offers an introduction to important issues in modern Germany: the Kaiserreich to the end of monarchy, Berlin as a modern metropolis, World War I, the democratic experiment of the Weimar Republic, and the rise and structures of National Socialism. Intensive practice in spoken and written German with emphasis on vocabulary acquisition and complex syntactical forms. Two 90-minute seminars. Prerequisite:107 or instructor's permission. Staff
• GER 208 Studies in German Language and Style: Contemporary Society, Politics, and Culture SpringContinuation of 207 (which is not, however, a prerequisite). Discussions of social, political, and cultural aspects of contemporary Germany. Basis of discussions are essays, literary texts, and films. Individual assignments to develop oral and written expression. Particularly recommended to students contemplating study or work in Germany. Two 90-minute seminars. Prerequisite: 107 or instructor's permission. Staff
• GER 209 Introduction to German Literature after 1700 Fall/Spring LAThe main periods of German literature from Lessing to the present studied through texts chosen to help the student acquire fluency in reading German and in the principles of literary interpretation. Two classes. M. Jennings
• GER 210 Introduction to German Philosophy Spring ECCovers German intellectual history from the Enlightenment to the present by focusing on the theoretical texts of its major authors (Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Heidegger, Arendt, Habermas). In addition to addressing the core discipline of philosophy, this course focuses on aesthetics, social, and political thought as well. All readings in English. Two lectures, one preceptorial. Staff
• GER 211 Introduction to Media Theory Spring ECTraces the development of critical reflection on media through careful readings of a wide range of media theoretical texts from the late 19th to the early 21st century. Topics range from the birth of single-point perspective to photography, from gramophones to radio, from pre-cinematic optical devices to film and television, and from telephony and typewriters to cyberspace. Covers the relationship between representation and technology, the historicity of perception, the interplay of aesthetics, techniques, and politics, and transformations of reigning notions of imagination, literacy, communication, reality, and truth. Two 90-minute seminars. D. Fore, T. Levin
• GER 301 Topics in German Drama and Theater (also HUM 301 ) Fall/Spring LAExploration of specific problems in the history of German theater, drama, and dramatic theory. Topics may range from the baroque drama to the importance of Brechtian theater for modernism, and from the dramatic representation of political conflicts to contemporary theater and performance studies. Staff
• GER 303 Topics in Prose Fiction Fall LACritical investigations of particular problems in the development of German literary prose. Topics may include love as a mode of literary self-expression, the role of utopia in the rise of the modern novel, the history of the German novella, detective fiction, and the modern short story and experimental prose. Prerequisite: 107. J. Vogl
• GER 305 Topics in German Poetry Not offered this year LAStudies of a particular question related to the development of German-language poetry and poetics. Topics may range from readings of major German poets (Goethe, Hölderlin, George, Rilke, Benn, Celan) to the paradigmatic status of the genre for 20th-century conceptions of the avant-garde. Prerequisite: 107. Staff
• GER 306 German Intellectual History Fall/Spring ECA study of major German philosophers and religious and social thinkers from the Reformation to the present. Selected works of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, or German-Jewish thinkers will be read together with contemporary interpretations. Two 90-minute seminars. Staff
• GER 307 Topics in German Culture and Society Fall LAExploration of key moments in German culture in light of its history and institutions. Topics may range from Marxist aesthetics to theories of fascism to German women writers. Readings and discussion in German. Staff
• GER 308 Topics in German Film History and Theory Fall ECWhat is film? Is it a language? Can one speak of cinematic literacy? Does film transform perception? Is there filmic thinking? This seminar on the theory and poetics of cinema will examine the varieties of ways -- semiotic, psychoanalytic, narratological - that filmmakers, philosophers and critics have analyzed film form, the cinematic experience, the construction of cinematic subjectivity, questions of aesthetic politics and notions of medium specificity. Staff
• GER 309 Literature, Philosophy, and Politics in the Weimar Republic LAAn interdisciplinary examination of continuity and change in the culture and the cultural politics of Germany between 1919 and 1933. Topics include expressionism in the visual arts and literature; Berlin Dada; the Conservative Revolution; abstract versus representational art (Thomas Mann, Neue Sachlichkeit); the Bauhaus and mass housing; montage in film and literature (Sergei Eisenstein, Walter Benjamin); the political theater (Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator), and the optics of the modern metropolis (Walter Ruttmann, Alfred Döblin). Two 90-minute seminars. D. Fore
• GER 314 Topics in the History and Theory of the Media SpringWhat defines life? And where do we locate the boundary between its proper and improper instances, between the natural and the monstrous? First emerging in the early 19th century, the prospects of artificial life continue to provoke both exhilaration and anxiety today. By examining works of philosophy, literature and film over a historical period ranging from early Romanticism to contemporary nanoculture, this seminar explores humanity's desire to become like the gods, fashioning species, companions, and slaves at will, even as these creations menace us through their intractability and threaten to take on an uncanny life of their own. Staff
• GER 320 Masterworks of European Literature: The Romantic Quest (also COM 320 ) Not offered this year LAWorks central to the tradition of modern European literature, including Goethe's Faust, Byron's Don Juan, Flaubert's Sentimental Education, Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, and Mann's Doctor Faustus. Each work treats the quest for greatness; each will be examined as to its form and place in the history of ideas. Two 90-minute seminars. Staff
• GER 321 Topics in German Medieval Literature (also GSS 321 /MED 321 ) Spring LAExploration of German medieval literature. Topics may include medieval German Arthurian literature and the relationship between gender and power in the medieval epics. S. Poor
• GER 323 Fairy Tales: The Brothers Grimm and Beyond Not offered this year LAWhat do fairy tales do? More than children's entertainment, they instruct, amuse, warn, initiate, and enlighten. Throughout history, they have functioned to humanize and conquer the bestial and barbaric forces that terrorize us. They have also disguised social anxieties about gender and sex. The history and social function of fairy tales will be explored in the context of Germany in the 18th-20th centuries. Texts include selections from the Grimms' Marchen, as well as from the literature of the Romantic, Weimar, and postwar periods. Prerequisite: 107. Two 90-minute seminars. S. Poor
• GER 324 Topics in Germanic Literatures Fall/Spring LACritical investigation of German language literature from 800 to present. Topics may include medieval German Arthurian literature, the Austrian literary avant-garde, love stories, as well as focused studies of selected authors. Two 90-minute Seminars. Staff
• GER 325 Nietzsche and Modern European Literature Not offered this year LAThe philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche as an important progenitor of the European modernist culture that arose in the period of urban capitalist modernity, roughly 1870-1930. Particular emphasis will be placed on a series of textual encounters between Nietzsche and such authors as Gide, Mann, Lawrence, Rilke, Yeats, Musil, and Malraux; their readings and rewritings of Nietzsche lent decisive impulses to the formal and thematic concerns of modernism. Two 90-minute seminars. M. Jennings
• GER 332 The Cultural Theory of the Frankfurt School Not offered this year ECAn examination of the work of the Frankfurt School of critical social theory on questions of modern culture. The course will focus on the textual debates among Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Siegfried Kracauer on the complex relationship of aesthetics and politics. These often polemical socio-philosophical texts attempt to map a contemporary cultural landscape reconfigured by the "culture industry," transformations in perception, the emergence of the mass, and new technologies of reproduction such as radio, cinema, and television. One three-hour seminar. M. Jennings, T. Levin
• GER 337 Court, Cloister, and City: Art and Architecture in Central and Eastern Europe (See ART 337)
• GER 340 German Literature in the Age of Revolution Not offered this year LAThe major works of the classical period in German literature. Texts by Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, and Kleist in relation to European historical, social, and philosophical change. Two 90-minute seminars. N. Wegmann
• GER 362 Contemporary German Literature Spring LAAn introduction to the poetry, drama, and prose of postwar Germany in the East and West. Emphasis on the political and social context of the major literary works from the '50s to the present. Two 90-minute seminars. Staff
• GER 370 Weimar Germany: Painting, Photography, Film (also ART 331 /ECS 370 ) Not offered this year LAThe visual arts in Germany during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933). Works of art, cinema, and literature in historical context. Topics include: modernism and modernity; Expressionism, Dada, New Objectivity in painting, photography, cinema, and literature; historical conditions of bodily experience and visual perception; emergence of new artistic and technological media; expansion of mass culture; place of politics in art; experience and representation of metropolitan life; changes in the conceptualization and representation of individuality, collectivity, embodiment, race, class, gender, sexuality. Two 90-minute seminars, one film screening. B. Doherty
• GER 371 Art in Germany Since 1960 (also ART 391 ) Not offered this year LAThe production and reception of art in the Federal Republic of Germany from c. 1960 to now, situating episodes in the history of painting, sculpture, and photography in relation to developments in literature and cinema. Topics include the problem of coming to terms with the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung); the West German economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) and the functions and meanings of art in consumer society; violence, politics, and representation; abstraction and figuration in painting, sculpture, and photography; history, memory, and artistic tradition; art as a vehicle of socio-political critique. Two 90-minute classes. B. Doherty
• GER 373 Modernist Colloquies: Photography and Literature (also ART 390 ) Not offered this year LAExemplary encounters between photography and literature in the 20th century. After providing students with a basis in the theory of photography, the course focuses on intersections between literary and photographic forms, producers, and movements. Topics will include modernism in New York (Williams, Strand, and Sheeler) and Mexico City (Lawrence, Bravo, Weston, Modotti), the New Photography and the photo essay in Germany (Benjamin, Moholy-Nagy, Renger-Patzsch, Sander), social criticism (Evans and Agee), surrealism (Breton), and the American road (Kerouac and Frank). Two 90-minute seminars. M. Jennings

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• Arts Form, if applicable. If you've excelled in architecture, creative writing, dance, music, theater or visual arts, and would like us to consider your talent, consult Princeton's online Optional Arts Form. Early action applicants must submit digital arts materials by Nov. 7; regular decision applicants must submit digital arts materials by Jan. 6. You can only submit your online Optional Arts Form after we have received the Common Application, Coalition Application or Universal College Application. If you are unable to submit online, please use the paper Optional Arts Form. For a list of acceptable file formats and submission types, review our Optional Arts Form page. For more information on the optional arts supplement, please visit our FAQs page.
• Interview. Depending on availability, once you have applied, you may be invited to interview with a member of one of our Princeton Alumni Schools Committees. If so, we encourage you to take advantage of this opportunity. Interviews take place after the Admission Office has received your application. Many Princeton Alumni Schools Committees have enough volunteers to offer every applicant an interview. As the interview is not a required element of the application, you will not be at a disadvantage if an interview is not available in your area. We do not offer on-campus interviews. Please visit our FAQs page for more information.

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